Redemption Songs

I recently played a show where I did something I hadn’t done in years: I performed songs by the band I founded, sang for and became quasi-famous in — Soul Coughing,

I put together Soul Coughing in the older, dirtier East Village, in 1992. We eventually recorded three albums for Warner Bros., and a few of our songs made it onto MTV. Behind that success, though, the band was a dark marriage that, among other things, solidified my enthusiasm for drugs. To multiply my unhappiness, I signed away — to my older bandmates — the rights to the music I’d written. When I finally left the band, I got clean and spent the next few years driving alone around the continent playing solo acoustic shows — 9,000 miles on my first tour, in 2000. I felt wildly liberated.

Acting upon a suggestion from the legendary New York Dolls frontman David Johansen — “Have you ever written a song that’s like, ‘Oh, booze, how I loved you, booze?'” — I started writing you-done-me-wrong songs, addressed to drugs. I wrote some of the best songs of my life. It was how fired up I was about the new work, as much as the darkness of my old band, that led me to abandon the Soul Coughing songs.

My audience for this new work was hard won and — particularly after I published a memoir, “The Book of Drugs” — was deeply supportive of the new self I was trying to become. At some point, though, I began to wonder if I could ever again own my old Soul Coughing songs — not legally, but in my own heart.

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Mike Doughty performing an acoustic show at the Legacy Theater in Springfield, Ill., in March.Credit Patrick Russell/Legacy Theatre

I’m going to try. I just released an album of reinterpretations, which, for the sake of brevity I’ll call here “Circles Super Bon Bon etc.” (the full title is an unpunctuated list of all the songs on the recording) and I’m about to begin a 32-city tour of an all-Soul-Coughing-songs show.

In some ways, those old songs still lurk in my muscle memory. When I perform a song repeatedly, it becomes like a program that I can run — I click on it, and it plays itself. The process of interpreting the song can be like piloting a drone from an air base in Nevada — I’m watching myself playing the guitar, and marveling at how weird it is that these words are coming out of my mouth. Playing a song from decades ago is unlike rereading a poem I wrote when I was 23, because I’m becoming it — a ghostly, psychedelic feeling.

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This is not the case with every song. Sometimes it’s more like driving around a neighborhood I used to live in; I foolishly think I still know my way around, and keep getting lost. I may know a certain leap from one chord to another, from a verse to a chorus and back again, but not the entire song as a linear process. Sometimes I find myself in the chorus, absolutely there, and then, just about to tumble into the next chord, I realize in a panic that I don’t know which part of the song I’m in.

“Did I just play the same verse twice?” I asked the audience during “The Idiot Kings.”

Yes, they confirmed, whoopingly, I had.

In some other songs during that show I made the correct move by the skin of my teeth — each time after excruciating microseconds — but when I can’t hide it, I paint it pink.

There’s an inherent strangeness to a performance like this. The songs are alive to me, whereas the audience has a relationship to an unchanging recording. Every time I play a song, there are microscopic alterations in how I phrase this or that word, or play a chord. Over years, it can amount to radical evolution.

As I sang, I could sometimes hear people singing along. I could hear their words dropping slightly earlier, or later, than my words, or a note would be longer, or shorter, or sometimes entirely different. Was somebody out in the darkness of the room completely baffled that I was playing her favorite song incorrectly?

To revisit these songs, I’m going back much further than the recordings, to when I first hammered them out. In fact, assembling those songs back then, in the recording studio, often required a Frankensteinian approach — culling the best sections, detaching a verse and affixing it to a different chorus. (It’s a method I developed after advice that my college poetry teacher Sekou Sundiata would give when there was a single gem in an otherwise boring piece. “That poem is a life support system for a killer line,” he’d say. Toss the poem, keep the line.)

Here is my new acoustic version of “Circles,” our 1998 on-alternative-rock-radio-almost-as-much-as-Sublime-or-Sugar-Ray-was hit song:

There were two ways that songs landed in Soul Coughing. The first was in a more or less verbatim version of what I wrote in a room, by myself, on acoustic guitar; in current performances, I’m doing the same thing I did with the band, minus the band.

The other way I brought a song into Soul Coughing was as a translated version of an acoustic-guitar song. You sometimes have to trick a band — particularly a very musicianly band, as Soul Coughing was — into playing what the song needs. I would let them jam, and, when there was an improvised part that suited something that I wrote, I ran to the mike and started singing it. There would often be significant chordal differences, or complexities I had to accommodate. This was manageable — I could elongate or curtail elements of the melody. It’s like swerving to avoid an obstacle in the road.

The guitar parts from the pre-translated-to-band versions have never been exposed to sunlight — they’re straight from a bedroom in 1996. The songs have also been altered a little to de-emphasize rhythmic ornaments that were peculiar to Soul Coughing. I think it would be disrespectful to reproduce elements that were written collectively, so I’ve been assiduous about de-Soul-Coughing-ifying these versions.

“Super Bon Bon”, which was a big radio hit for us, consists of sections that were were entirely discrete when they were written — in fact, they were composed years apart — and, though the Soul Coughing version fused them together, when I go back to the process that began it all, they’re somehow disconnected again.

Here’s an acoustic performance of the final-draft version of “Super Bon Bon”:

When played in solo versions, these songs are ineffably different. In the born-and-bred-on-guitar songs, there’s a feel to the guitar playing that was semi-disguised by other instruments. I’m glad that the guitar now has more space in which to roam, because I like my idiosyncrasies. When I was a teenager doing the anti-folk open mikes, I was doing my best to sound like the beats of A Tribe Called Quest — I failed, but interestingly. The starkness, to me, feels like the song’s natural habitat.

The most challenging Borgesian map-versus-territory aspect in playing these songs isn’t technical, but — if you’ll allow me to be a hippie here — spiritual. A live performance’s intensity of focus — both mine and the audience’s — can’t be replicated in rehearsal. There’s a communal mind to be navigated. What’s gratifying to me about playing to an audience isn’t the applause; it’s the oceanic feeling of fused consciousness. You can’t rehearse that — it’d be like rehearsing the Himalayas.

Mike Doughty has released seven solo albums, including “Yes and Also Yes” and “The Flip Is Another Honey.” His memoir, “The Book of Drugs,” was published in 2012. He DJs, makes electronic dance music and produces tracks for hip-hop bands under the name Dubious Luxury.